YouTube sensation Zoella, who has tapped into the platform’s young audience.
Photograph: LNP/Rex Shutterstock

Youtube’s move towards enabling users to buy directly from ads makes complete sense. This is continuing trends initiated by Facebook and Instagram who are allowing consumers to buy directly from editorial, news feeds and ads.

We’re seeing a complete compression of the path-to-purchase journey that is now taking place in just minutes, and increasingly on mobile. The move will allow them to not only generate income from advertisers of typically high value items where research starts with Google, but also brands wanting to drive impulsive purchases via snappier news feeds.

This follows from news last month that YouTube is soon likely to succumb to pressure and allow brands to use a raft of third-party video viewability measurement and analytics tools can hardly come as a surprise.

The company already admitted as much last spring, when it quietly announced that third-party pixel integration would be allowed. However, US food maker Kellogg’s fired the loudest warning shot to YouTube to get its act together in May this year by pulling their ads from the platform, followed by their director of global insights, Aaron Fetters, commenting on video ad spend: “If we can’t measure it, it’s hard to justify the investment.”

The battle lines between those who allow for such independent, third-party measurement and those who do not had, up to this point, been clear for some time. Every online publisher, apart from the big two – Facebook and Google – allowed such tools to be applied to video ad campaigns.

However, even before getting to the stage of verification and campaign performance measurement, the overall issue of defining viewability is a tricky metric to calculate at the best of times. The Media Rating Council (MRC) defines video ad viewability as when at least half of an ad’s pixels are viewable for two seconds or more. Based on this, viewability merely gives an ad a slim chance of being seen rather than fully guaranteeing it. Not only this, according to a study by Google, the average viewability for video ads across the web is 54%, meaning around half of ads might not even be seen by consumers.

In this environment of questionable and uncertain value for advertisers, YouTube only compounded its problems by refusing to allow independent transparency and what this has meant is that it isn’t presently considered as a traditional online advertising channel. Despite this critical problem, it does still have over 1 billion users, so it can’t be ignored – there is still a huge audience of consumers on offer. However, what has tended to happen is that YouTube has become a dumping ground for small campaigns because neither brand nor performance can be measured accurately.

There are a number of reasons why YouTube is undertaking this 180–degree turn. Facebook’s jump into video has had a huge effect, with Mark Zuckerberg’s juggernaut claiming that more videos are watched on his platform now than YouTube’s. Add in Facebook’s Instagram, which is snapping up the youth mobile audience and attracting increased video spend, and you’ve got powerful reasons for why YouTube needs to be more advertiser friendly.

However, the biggest reason for this sea change relates back to YouTube’s own brand. On one hand, it is losing high-value customers, such as Kellogg’s and Unilever, and wants to win them back by becoming a respected publisher, like its rivals are, thanks to their openness to verification. On the other hand, where once, YouTube was a platform for funny animal videos, uploaded by anyone, it is now moving towards being a premium publisher with more brand-focused content. Recent reports have suggested that it is likely to focus on a mix of free and ad-supported content, in conjunction with premium videos that sit behind a paywall, by the end of year.

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What does this change actually mean for advertisers? Simply put, YouTube’s shift can only be seen as positive. Increased transparency is both a more brand-centric and customer-centric approach and can only mean clearer insight into the performance of video campaigns. One feature, which is often overlooked, but which is critically in its favour with this shift, compared with Facebook, is that it is also evolving into a real-time streaming channel, where advertisers will soon be able to broadcast live and pre-recorded brand content.

Overall, brands will be able to gauge the return on investment of video ads more effectively and assess how consumers respond to their video content, which is essential considering that seven out of 10 marketers expect video ad spend to accelerate in the next 12 months. In addition, this transparency drive might also mean lower costs for advertisers, or at the very least a clearer cost and effectiveness ratio for any YouTube campaign.

From my own experience, any advertiser wishing to reach a young audience rapidly will probably turn to YouTube, since a masthead on the platform can secure a huge reach of the 15-25-years-old segment in a limited time.

With verification and measurement now likely to be allowed, YouTube, combined with such a strong young audience, just became much more interesting to brands again and this can only be a good thing for advertisers.